WELCOME JOHN P. DAVIDSON

JOHN P. DAVIDSON

John P. Davidson was born and grew up in Fredericksburg, a small ranching community in the Texas Hill Country. He studied economics and history at the University of Texas at Austin then joined the Peace Corps, serving as a Volunteer in Peru where he worked with agricultural coops in the desert south of Lima. Following the Peace Corps, he earned a Master’s degree at the University of Texas while working in a community literacy program.

He began writing at Texas Monthly magazine where one of his early assignments was to follow Mexican workers crossing the Rio Grande River to find jobs in Texas. He made the trip twice with two brothers and in 1980 published The Long Road North, (Doubleday, 1980) He has held senior editorial positions at Texas Monthly, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Vanity Fair. As a freelance writer, he has contributed to GQ, Fortune, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Elle, Preservation, and Mirabella. He received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and the Penney-Missouri Prize for Excellence in Journalism. He taught English at the Universidad Catolica de Puerto Rico, and has been a guest lecturer at the University of the Americas in Cholula, Mexico. He travels frequently in Latin America and lives in Austin, Texas.Connect with John at these sites:

ABOUT THE BOOK

Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution and the head of The Fourth International, was exiled from Russia in the late 1920’s by Joseph Stalin and later assassinated for opposing Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Adolph Hitler.

In this dark and riveting thriller, John Porterfield Davidson has re-envisioned the life and mission of Ramón Mercader, the Spanish nationalist enlisted to murder the great intellectual and who obediently and reluctantly completed the task after a great deal of self-doubt and soul-searching regret.

Ramón’s great internal conflict is ignited by an unexpected and unwanted passion that develops for a left-leaning Jewish woman named Sylvia whom he is ordered to seduce as a means of getting at Trotsky but ends up being the one enthralled by the woman’s intelligence and gentle trusting nature. This finer feeling creates a conflict between Ramón and his mother, part of a satellite group controlled by Stalin who has conscripted her son to murder Trotsky. We follow the protagonist through Spain, France and Belgium and finally to Mexico where he comes into contact with Frieda Kahlo who along with Diego Rivera have offered Trotsky and his wife refuge in one of their gated homes.

Read an excerpt

The men could see the car coming on the road for a long time. It would appear on a rise, then disappear, a black sedan moving through the landscape of white limestone hills. The road was a rough track. Jeeps came that way and trucks, mules, and wagons, but a car was rare.

It was cold that afternoon, the temperature hovering near freezing. Rafts of slate-gray clouds marched south. As far as one could see, the ground had been stripped of anything that would burn; brush, trees, and even weeds had been cut down or ripped up. Tin cans radiated out from the old farmhouse and the entrenchments dug along the ridge. The smell of rotting garbage and human excrement filled the air. Across the valley, on the opposite hillside, the Loyalist camp looked like stone-age dwellings dug into earth. Occasionally, soldiers the size of ants would appear, and a lone voice would echo through the cold dry air. Or, with a resonant metallic snap, a loudspeaker would come on and one of the Loyalists would drone on about General Franco saving Spain and how the Republican Army was filled with comunistas y maricones—Communists and queers. The sound of gunfire was desultory and usually distant—the pow-pow-pow of a rifle or the staccato of a machine gun.

Lieutenant Mercader lay huddled on his cot in a low stone shed that stank of sheep. He heard the car arriving, the voices of men talking excitedly. “Es una dama con su joven.” It’s a lady with a boy.

Women didn’t come to the front, not even peasant women trying to sell food. The lieutenant was cold and exhausted, but he put his feet to the ground and reached for his steel-frame glasses. The shed was filled with gloom, the sound of snoring. When he pulled the tarpaulin from the opening, he saw the Peugeot, elegant despite the crust of white mud, sliding into the farmyard. As he watched, his mother got out of the car. Tall, as tall as most men, she was imposing and inevitable with her shock of white hair. As she walked to the farmhouse, she wrapped a black shawl around her head. She knew the protocol. She would see Commander Contreras first.

The lieutenant considered going to the car to talk to the little boy, his half-brother, sitting in the back. Instead, he let the tarpaulin drop and returned to his cot to wait, pulling the wool blankets over his boots and up to his chin. The ache of shame lay like a chunk of ice in the pit of his stomach. His face rigid, his eyes moving rapidly from side to side, he thought of the words he would say, the hard truths that must be told. Shivering, listening to one of the junior officers snore, he inserted a hand into his pants to scratch at the lice feasting in his pubic hair.

After a while, voices came from the farmhouse, the sounds of departure. She was talking to Commander Contreras, saying goodbye. Then, as was inevitable, she stood at the opening to the shed. “Hijo, ven! Es Caridad, tu mama.” Son, come! It’s Caridad, your mother.

“Voy,” he answered, his voice deep and hoarse.

With a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he pushed the tarpaulin aside and stepped out of the shed. He studied her face for signs of grieving and saw the flush in her cheeks from drinking brandy at the commander’s fireside.

“Here,” she said, handing him a pack of cigarettes.

“Where did you get them?”

“Barcelona.”

“How?”

She shrugged, refusing to commit.

“What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“Is that how you greet me?”

He didn’t answer. The expression on his face did not change.

“I wanted to see you. We have to talk.”

“About?”

“I need to tell you about Pablo.”

“I know what happened. What can you possibly say?”

“We have other things to discuss.”

“What?”

“Where can we talk? In private?”

“Not here. In the car?”

“No, there is the chauffer and Luis.”

“Then come this way. It isn’t nice, but nothing is.”

He led her down a path through the farmyard and around the corner of the barn. The men, trying to get out of the north wind and looking for privacy, had been shitting against the wall. So much shit accumulated, Contreras ordered them to find another place. Now the dung was dry, frozen, and relatively odorless. Dead rats hung from a wire fence, a warning to their surviving brethren.

She snapped open her handbag to withdraw a second pack of cigarettes, offering him one along with a small box of wax matches. He lit hers, then his, taking a deep breath. “This will make my head spin.”

“What is the ration?”

“Two a day.”

“Keep these as well. There are more in the car.”

Mother and son, they stood in the cold, smoking. Crows cawed in the distance. The black shawl wrapped around her head suggested a peasant woman in mourning, but her back was too straight and there was something innately haughty about the cut of her lips and her prominent cheekbones. She took a deep breath, exhaling audibly through her nostrils. Her eyes drifted over the holes, pocking the plot of ground next to the barn, trying to decipher the mysterious rectilinear pattern, slowly understanding that there had once been an orchard. The soldiers had cut down the trees for firewood, then come back to dig up the stumps to burn, too.

He turned to face her. “So, tell me about my brother.”

“You said you knew.”

“I said you were wasting your time if that was why you came. But now that you’re here, tell me. I want to hear your version.”

Her eyes moved, appraising him, looking for a way past the anger. He was twenty-two, aged by the war, fully a man. His cheeks were hollow, his lips chapped and red. Though dirty and tired, he was handsome with his thick auburn hair. He had her looks, his olive skin shading into the faintest lavender beneath deep green eyes.

“Tell me,” he insisted. “How did they kill him?”

“It was a disciplinary action. Pablo disobeyed orders. He knew the rules. You don’t leave bodies in a public place after a political execution. You never leave a body on the street. What Pablo did was no small thing.”

“They could have warned him.”

“They did. They warned him. He was seeing a woman who belonged to POUM, a suspected Trotskyist. They told him to break it off, but he refused.”

“That was Alicia. He was in love with her.”

“He put himself above the cause.”

“You didn’t defend him?”

“What could I do? I wasn’t there. The orders had been given.”

“With all of your connections, all of the strings you pull, you let your comrades make an example of Pablo? You let this happen?”

She laughed, the silent bitter gesture of a laugh. “I didn’t let it happen. You overestimate my power.”

His voice choked as tears stung his eyes.

“Is it true they strapped him with dynamite? Is it true they marched him in front of a tank? Tell me, is it true?”

“Yes.”

“They had him run down like a dog. They gave him a sporting chance, then crushed him in the dirt like a miserable cur.”

She nodded.

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Please, Ramón! This is cruel.”

“He was my brother!”

“He was my son!”

He looked away. The wind was blowing; a crow, its black wings ruffling, had landed on the fence to peck at one of the dead rats.

“The shame. His. Ours. He had to be shitting his pants with terror. And all of his comrades watching!”

She met his eyes, her own blurring with tears. “You have to understand. He was going to be punished. The decision had been made and I could do nothing. Everyone was watching me, waiting for me to break. But no, I held my head up. All I could control was my own behavior. I made the ultimate sacrifice and kept silent. I proved my loyalty beyond a doubt and now they owe me.”

“What are you doing here? What do you want?”

She tossed away the end of her cigarette.

“You know this is a lost cause.”

“If we lose to Franco, we’ll be without a country.”

Her chin lifted, indicating the entrenchments. “Those are Spaniards you’re shooting at on the opposite side of the valley. They’re like you, no different. They’re hungry, scratching at their own flea bites, freezing in their own shit. This is a revolution we should have won. This is archaic, rooting in the mud. You don’t turn people into revolutionaries by shooting at them. You indoctrinate them. We would have won had it not been for Trotsky, splitting the left, setting the people against each other.”

“I know about Trotsky. You needn’t preach to me.”

“You have to understand that the fight has moved on; a bigger war is coming.”

He shuddered, feeling the cold once more. “What do you want from me?”

Her eyes settled on his. “I have been given an opportunity. I’m leading a mission that will change the course of history. I am second in command. It’s a great honor for all women. I’ve come here with an assignment for you.”

“As you see, I’m engaged in fighting a war.”

“No, you have to listen to me. This is undercover, intelligence. Our orders come directly from Stalin.”

“How did this plum fall into your hands? Is this a reward for your loyalty?”

“Perhaps in part.”

“Who is first in command?”

“Colonel Eitingon. Leonid.”

He laughed. “Of course, Eitingon! Hasn’t he done enough to us?”

“What do you mean?”

“He left you when you were pregnant. I remember your misery.”

“I behaved like a bourgeois girl. He did what he could. He never left us. He helped us. He paid for you to go to school.”

“He abandoned you.”

She winced, shaking her head. “That isn’t true.”

“That’s his bastard sitting out there in the car.”

“Leonid wanted to stay with me.”

“But he had two wives, two families. Walking out on Papa the way you did, dragging all of us to France, you ruined our family.”

“I had to leave Barcelona. I was dying on Calle Ancha, and I didn’t know it.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“Ramón, you want to hate me, but we’re alike. You have so much to gain, but you must face the truth. We have to think beyond Spain.”

“Without our country we have nothing. We’ll be like the Gypsies, the Jews, wandering from place to place.”

“That’s why we have to win the bigger war. Ramón, we have to think ahead. I can take you out of all this. Tonight in Barcelona, you will have a hot bath and a good meal. You can see Lena. You’ll sleep in a warm bed, and in France…”

“France?”

“Yes, Paris. We would leave tomorrow. What I am offering you is something far better than this, perhaps something glorious.”

WELCOME ERIC C. LEUTHARDT

ERIC C. LEUTHARDT

ERIC C. LEUTHARDT M.D. is a neurosurgeon and biomedical engineer as well as a recognized pioneer in neuroprosthetics. He is widely published in scientific journals and has received a number of scholarly awards in recognition of his contributions Dr. Leuthardt is the director of the Center of or Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology at Washington University School of Medicine, where he researches brain-computer interfaces. He is ranked as one of the most prolific inventors in the world, with more than 800 patents either granted of pending. REDDEVIL 4 is his first novel.Connect with Dr. Leuthardt at these sites:

ABOUT THE BOOK

Renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Hagan Maerici is on the verge of a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could change the way we think about human consciousness. Obsessed with his job and struggling to save his marriage, Dr. Maerici is forced to put his life’s work on the line when a rash of brutal murders strikes St. Louis.

Edwin Krantz, an aging, technophobic detective, and his partner, Tara Dezner, are tasked with investigating the horrifying killings. Shockingly, the murders have all been committed by prominent citizens who have no obvious motives or history of violence. Seeking an explanation for the suspects’ strange behavior, Krantz and Denzer turn to Dr. Maerici, who believes that the answer lies within the killers’ brains themselves. Someone is introducing a glitch into the in-brain computer systems of the suspects—a virus that turns ordinary citizens into murderers. With time running out, this trio of unlikely allies must face a gauntlet of obstacles, both human and A.I., as they attempt to avert disaster.

WELCOME BACK B.J. DANIELS

B.J. DANIELS

B.J. DANIELS, a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author, wrote her first book after a career as an award-winning newspaper journalist and author of 37 published short stories. That first book, ODD MAN OUT, received a 4 ½ star review from Romantic Times magazine and went on to be nominated for Best Intrigue for that year. Since then she has won numerous awards including a career achievement award for romantic suspense and numerous nominations and awards for best book. Daniels lives in Montana with her husband, Parker, and two Springer Spaniels, Spot and Jem. When she isn’t writing, she snowboards, camps, boats and plays tennis. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Thriller Writers, Kiss of Death and Romance Writers of America.Connect with B.J. at these sites:

ABOUT THE BOOK

Just how far are people willing to go to keep their secrets?

Protecting the citizens of Beartooth, Montana, is never an easy job. It’s been one year, and Sheriff Dillon Lawson still feels guilty that he couldn’t save his twin brother, Ethan. But the biggest test of his bravery comes when Tessa Winters arrives, claiming to be pregnant…with Ethan’s baby. At first, Dillon can’t decide if this beautiful woman is a con artist or a victim. If Ethan didn’t die in that car crash, then where is he—and why is he hiding?

Now, Dillon is prepared to do anything to uncover the truth—anything except admit his growing feelings for Tessa. But with violence threatening, Tessa and Dillon must trust in each other to save not only themselves…but also Tessa’s unborn child.

WELCOME LORI LITE

LORI LITE

Ms. Lite’s titles are considered a resource for parents, psychologists, therapists, child life specialists, teachers, and yoga instructors. Her Indigo Dreams® audio book/CD series has been awarded the CNE Award of Excellence. Ms. Lite has been interviewed and written articles for several media outlets, including: Family Circle, NY Times, MSNBC, ABC Radio; CBS News; USA Today; Web MD; Stress Free Living; Mind, Body, and Soul; and Job Club with Tory Johnson. She has also been featured in several publications which include Prevention Magazine, Parent Guide New York, Family Circle, Kiwi Magazine, and Aspiring Woman. Lori is a certified children’s meditation facilitator and Sears’ Manage My Life parenting expert. She gained national attention when she appeared on Shark Tank, an ABC/Mark Burnett production.Connect with Lori at these sites:

ABOUT THE BOOK

Stress management solutions for you and your children!
Kids today are more stressed, overwhelmed, and struggling with anxiety than ever before. Children are not born with the coping strategies needed to navigate today’s increasing demands of technology, bullying, academics, and family dynamics. You yourself might wonder how your own stressed-out lifestyle is affecting your children. Based on Lori Lite’s award-winning series, Stress Free Kids provides relaxation techniques you can use to free your child from stress.

Lite shows you how to apply breathing, visualizations, affirmations, and muscle relaxation exercises effortlessly throughout the day. These parenting solutions to everyday stressors will reduce worries and anxiety while increasing self-esteem. You and your children will gain freedom as you live a more joy-filled life with less stress.

With this complete resource as your guide, your family will create your own collection of stress-free moments that add up to peace and confidence–for you and your children.

WELCOME BACK CARLA NEGGERS

CARLA NEGGERS

Carla Neggers is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 60 novels, with translations in 24 languages. Born and raised on the western edge of the beautiful Quabbin Reservoir in rural Massachusetts, Carla grew up with tales of her father’s life as a Dutch sailor and her mother’s childhood in northwest Florida.

At a young age, Carla began penning her own stories on a branch high up in her favorite sugar maple. Now she enjoys spending time at the family homestead (now a tree farm) with her six brothers and sisters and their families.

When she’s not writing, Carla loves to travel, hike, kayak, garden, and, of course, dive into a good book. She lives with her family in Vermont, near Quechee Gorge.
Connect with NAME at these sites:

ABOUT THE BOOK

Being rescued by a good-looking, bad-boy firefighter isn’t how Samantha Bennett expected to start her stay in Knights Bridge, Massachusetts. Now she has everyone’s attention—especially that of Justin Sloan, her rescuer, who wants to know why she was camped out in an abandoned old New England cider mill.

Samantha is a treasure hunter who has returned to Knights Bridge to solve a 300-year-old mystery and salvage her good name. Justin remembers her well. He’s the one who alerted her late mentor to her iffy past and got her fired. But just because he doesn’t trust her doesn’t mean he can resist her. Samantha is daring, determined, seized by wanderlust—everything that strong, stoic Justin never knew he wanted. Until now…

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